SAP Unveils Tools to Sense Real-Time Demand

September 20, 2013
| SAP - In-Memory Computing

SAP NEWSBYTE - SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced new capabilities to improve companies’ demand management and business planning processes, delivering tools with a real-time view of market information. The announcement was made at the Gartner Supply Chain Executive Conference 2013, being held on September 23-24 in London.

Given intense global competitive pressure, companies need to transform their supply chains to become demand-driven or even market-driven. Supply chain professionals and their marketing counterparts need to work more closely together than ever before. With a real-time view on all market activity, including sentiments from social networks, leading companies will be able to sense and shape demand. Marketing will create promotions for products while agile supply chain organizations ensure rapid response to changes in demand patterns.

SAP provides the connected enterprise with a new demand management solution: The SAP® Enterprise Demand Sensing application. Capabilities within the new release improve the quality of demand forecasts within the short-term horizon in order to help reduce stock-outs and expediting costs and ultimately boost sales. The application captures historical forecast trends, compares and mathematically blends different forecast sources with demand analytics and characterizes demand by analyzing historical forecast accuracy, bias and intermittency trends.

The launch of SAP Enterprise Demand Sensing comes on the heels of the newly introduced SAP® Demand Signal Management application, powered by the SAP HANA® platform, which integrates all relevant internal and external demand signals into a single source of truth. With SAP Demand Signal Management and SAP Enterprise Demand Sensing, combined with the SAP® Advanced Planning and Optimization component, SAP now offers a holistic, end-to-end demand management solution to enable demand-driven supply chains. Customers can manage the full process from demand signal capture, both from structured and unstructured sources, to short-term and long-term forecasting, leading to an eventual increase in sales revenue and decrease in inventory costs.

“The availability of these demand management tools is a game changer for SAP customers,” said Hans Thalbauer, senior vice president, Line-of-Business Solutions for Supply Chain, SAP. “Predictive analytics capabilities allow users to significantly increase the short-term forecast, which in turn boosts sales and increases profits, all using a connected enterprise.”